First, let me say that I'm a Drupal newbie, and am extremely impressed by all that Drupal has to offer. I'm particularly enamored with Drupal's taxonomy module. I've reached a crossroad in my Druapal education, however, that I'm hoping that the gurus here can help me with. It is as much a philosophical question as anything.
The site I am working on will contain all the things you might expect it to: blogs, stories, pages, polls, surveys, and ostensibly forums. It has two vocabularies, one that could ultimately be very large, and another relatively small and more reasonably managed vocabulary. It is important that all content get tagged to the two vocabularies. The issue is that if I'm going to properly implement forums, then the container/forum structure should be the cross-product of the two vocabularies, which of course will not only be huge, but unwieldy. Furthermore, since the vocabularly structure for forums is separate from the other vocabularies, every time I implement a change in one of the other vocabularies, I would have to duplicate it in the forum vocabulary.
So I'm now asking myself do I really need forums? Aren't Drupal forums just a nicely themed presentation of what would otherwise be stories in Drupal? Can't I just organize the other types of content using views and themes to get the same end result? Yes, my end-user community expects the concept of a forum, but isn't it a mindset? Doesn't the same hold true for blogs as well? Fortunately blogs already use the same vocabularies though, and since the end-user community also expects blogs, it's not really an issue, but doesn't the same apply there as well? Fundamentally, blogs, stories, and forum posts are all the same, right?
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